Today, of course, is the 38th day of Cunagonda...
I think the night I heard "High School Madness" changed the course of my life. I was probably in 8th or 9th grade and on Sunday nights, while in bed, I'd listen to a late night comedy show on the radio. It was an hour of mixed material that flowed from one piece to the next with no breaks for chatting or commercials. One fateful night -- in among the George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Monty Python, Lily Tomlin and Bill Cosby -- I heard an amazing 7 minutes of surreal comedy. It was a "movie" with Archie and Jughead type characters except that Riverdale was a military high school in a warzone. The jokes, innuendo, references and satire came at a speed that made my head hurt. I could barely remember what had gone on between the density of the material and my laughing. The next day, on the way to school, I tried to re-live the experience for my friend Chip. Somehow, he knew I was talking about Firesign Theatre.
I'd seen their albums of course - their albums were pretty popular in the early 1970s and you couldn't help by notice their eye-catching covers when you went into a record store. The one that had always caught my attention was How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?, with it's cover image of Groucho and John under the banner "All Hail Marx and Lennon". I guess I'd always assumed they were some kind of druggy/political/hippy comedy group that were going to be too weird for me. But I sussed out the skit I'd heard as "High School Madness!", the end of Side One of Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and bought a copy the next chance I had.
I had been right on one count: the stuff was definitely weird when measured against the comedy I was familiar with. It was sort of like Monty Python but faster paced, without the over-arcing silliness and non-sequitars, and full of verbal wordplay and puns (ranging from groaners to so-clever-they-sail-past) that required multiple listens to begin to appreciate. Firesign satirized everyone and everything with equal relish -- TV, news media, politics (liberal and conservative), the military, pacifists, religion, aliens, hippies, drugs, the government. Dwarf was sequenced like a person switching channels on late night TV, what we would now call channel surfing though at that time there weren't many TV remotes and nothing beyond the 13 VHF and a couple of UHF channels in most homes. As the material progresses, the viewed world starts interacting with the viewer, a man named George Tirebiter. And of course, the listener is viewing the viewer. Strange, surreal, subversive and 15 years ahead of its time.
The Firesign Theatre was composed of four men living in LA: Phil Proctor, David Ossman, Philip Austin, and Peter Bergman. Bergman had a radio show called Radio Free Oz and eventually the other three came to be a part of it. Proctor and Bergman were Yale-trained drama grads (actor and playwright), Austin was an actor and Ossman was a radio producer. Together they assaulted the late night radio waves with anarchic improvisational comedy that included satire so close to the bone that the audiences weren't always sure if it was a put on or something real. In 1967 CBS signed them to do a record album and Firesign Theatre was born (the name of the group comes from the fact that all four have astrological signs that are fire signs.) Over the next eight years they would produce a body of recorded comedy unlike anything anyone has done since.
Their first album Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him came out in early 1968. The main themes of this disc are the exploitation of the Native Americans by the US and the irony of counterculture and while it's not as sonically complex as later works, all the seeds are there (social satire, puns and wordplay, simultanious action in the foreground and background). The first nine minutes of the disc contain: Since there is no visual except for the covers (unlike Python), I've never really gotten a sense of who does which characters and which voices go with which performer, even after 30 years of listening.
How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All? (1969)
Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers (1970)
Dear Friends (1971)
The Tale Of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra (1973)
Everything You Know Is Wrong (1974)
In The Next World You're On Your Own (1975)
Shoes For Industry! : The Best Of Firesign Theater (1993). A double-disc collection for their 25th anniversary. Contains a good sampling of material from 1967-1975 but nothing really new or previously unheard.
Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him (1967)
I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus (1971)
Not Insane (1972)
More To come...
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